


Yankee Doodle Doughboy

by MercuryGray



Category: Turn (TV 2014)
Genre: Alternate Timelines, Alternate Universe - World War I, F/M, Multi
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2017-01-31
Updated: 2017-06-30
Packaged: 2018-09-21 01:35:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 12,158
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/9525827
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MercuryGray/pseuds/MercuryGray
Summary: When Thomas Paine wrote about 'the times that try men's souls' he was writing of events in his own lifetime - but trying times aren't limited to the late 18th century. It's everyone's favorite spy ring a little over a hundred and twenty years in the future -- and with 120% more artillery barrages, airplanes, women's rights, trench raids, and just the tiniest bit of jazz.A collection of somewhat connected short pieces involving various characters from the show originally published on tumblr.





	1. The Yankee Doodle Doughboy

**Author's Note:**

> "I'm the kid that's all the candy,  
> I'm a Yankee Doodle Dandy,  
> I'm glad I am, So's Uncle Sam.  
> I'm a real live Yankee Doodle,  
> Made my name and fame and boodle,  
> Just like Mister Doodle did, by riding on a pony."
> 
> So says George M. Cohan in "Yankee Doodle Boy" - a song published in 1904 and one of many that Cohan (and others) would write during the teens and twenties to use an image from the Revolutionary War to sell the idea of 'America' to a growing public. 
> 
> Anyone who knows me knows I love a World War One AU - so putting these two things together wasn't very much of a stretch. 
> 
> It's 1917. America has just committed her small, inexperienced army to a war they probably shouldn't get involved in, forced to action by the actions of other nations against our national interests. Their officer corps will consist largely of eager, college educated civilian volunteers shepherded by a few old hands who have made the army their career. Their chief is one of the few men in the upper echelons who has any kind of field experience and who is basically rebuilding the army from scratch. They will be fighting an entirely new kind of war, against armies much better trained and far, far more experienced.
> 
> ...Sound like anyone we know?
> 
> Underfunded, under-equipped, and 'Over Here', the American Expeditionary Force is ready to go lend a hand in France - and a few familiar faces will help her do just that.

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Captain Tallmadge is back from training and ready to jump back into army life to apply everything he's learned while spying - ahem, learning from - the British. 
> 
> A few opening brushstrokes for this alternate universe.

The train lurched to a shuddering halt, and Captain Benjamin Tallmadge, AEF, jerked away with the movement of his car, his hat falling to the floor of the carriage. Various whistles and shouts, and then the familiar noise of the railway platform, conductors and porters calling for luggage, and doors opening and slamming closed. The only thing strange about it was that the voices outside were French, not English -- for this wasn’t Union Station, or anything remotely resembling the same. It was a water stop outside the hamlet of Gondrecourt, now home to several hundred thousand American doughboys, each of them, at present, engaged in the the time-honored tasks of an army in camp -- hurrying up, and waiting.

 

Ben slung his bag down from the luggage rack above his head, fixing his hat on and making his way outside, ears adjusting to the din after hours of having nothing more than the click of wheels and rails and the scream of the train’s whistle as they sped away into the countryside, heading southeast. It made Ben feel odd, to be traveling away from the destruction, rather than towards it, as he felt the eyes of the conductor and the other passengers on him, taking in his uniform (neither the horizon blue of their own poilu nor the now-familiar khaki of the British) and his apparent full use of all four limbs. _Il n’est pas blesse,_ he knew they were all thinking behind their frowns. _He’s not injured._ And well they should frown -- _les Americains_ had been in their country for months now with little to show for it except for less food, less room on trains, and rowdy American voices in every barroom and estaminet between here and Paris.

 

He nodded his thanks to the conductor on his way out, tipping his hat in what he hoped was the polite fashion and stepped onto the platform, trying to find a familiar face in the sea of frustrated Service of Supply types and their equally frustrated French counterparts, each one hoping that shouting at increasingly higher volumes might somehow solve the language barrier.

 

“BEN!” He turned towards the sound of his name, the speaker (or shouter, rather) waving merrily from the end of the platform. Tallmadge smiled. Seeing Caleb’s face without his beard was still taking some getting used to -- but it was still the same shit-eating grin underneath it all.

 

The two men embraced heartily. “Sorry I’m late,” Ben apologized. “Couldn’t get them to move the damn thing any faster.”

 

“Good train ride?” Caleb asked, taking Ben’s bag without comment and hefting it easily onto his shoulder.

 

“Long,” Ben said, following Caleb out of the station before trying to hold an actual conversation. “Felt like we had to stop every half-hour for something.”

 

“Eh, that’s the French for you,” his friend said. “Inefficient. If this was any kind of decent country there’d be a timetable and they’d follow it. And a bus schedule, so yours truly didn’t have to go trooping through god-awful roads to get you.”

 

“You didn’t walk.” Ben had a sudden, horrible thought of having to march back to camp on badly-kept roads in his boots.

 

Caleb’s eyes’  lit up. “Indeed I did not! I got a new toy,” he revealed happily, taking a detour around an outbuilding to a little side street, out of the hustle and bustle around the station. Ben followed, already a little on edge. Caleb’s new toys could be, in a phrase, dangerous. “Well, what’dya think?” he asked, stepping aside so Ben could get a look.

 

“What is _that?_ ” Ben asked, his jaw dropping in frank appreciation. Caleb smiled, practically bouncing on his toes. “And where did you get it?” He looked back at Caleb with a sudden thought. “You didn’t steal it, did you?”

 

“Benny!” Caleb pretended to be hurt. “Brigadier requisitioned it for me -- said I couldn’t well run all my messages by bicycle when we move out to the front.”

 

“It’s gorgeous,” Ben said, stroking the handlebar and admiring the chrome. A _motorbike._ A real, honest to goodness motorbike. Complete with sidecar for dispatch pouches -- or recently arrived friends.

 

“It’ll be a bit of a squeeze,” Caleb observed, “With your bag and all. But you won’t have to wait for a truck.” His grin widened. “Unless you’d _like_ to wait for a truck.”

 

Ben looked with confusion at his friend. “Why would I…” Caleb’s meaning suddenly dawned on him. “You weren’t angry my train was late at all, were you?” he realized. “You were at Claudette’s! You...bastard!” He hit Caleb’s arm with the flat of his hand, switching to a fist when he realized the burly man probably wasn’t going to feel the first blow. Claudette’s was the local brothel, a large house on the far side of town that had a bad habit of creating brawls and hung-over officers. Brigadier Washington had declared the place off-limits to his men, making pronouncements about the moral health of the division -- but that hadn’t really stopped anyone from going.

 

“Ow -- Ben! Jesus, don’t kill a man for seeing an opportunity.”

 

But Ben wasn’t finished yet. “It was Genevieve, wasn’t it? Admit it -- you used the pass to come get me to go and see a girl. Caleb Brewster, you are going to get us in so much trouble. Claudette’s is off-limits and you know it, Brigadier Washington said...”

 

“I’m here on time, aren’t I?” Caleb said, brushing his coat off and trying to rearrange himself. “And who’s gonna tell on me? You?”

 

“One of these days, Caleb, someone is going to see,” Ben predicted, folding himself into the sidecar and gesturing for his bag so he could arrange it across his lap. “And then not even your silver tongue will be able to get you out of trouble.”

 

Caleb rolled his eyes and pulled an extra pair of goggles out of his greatcoat, passing them over to Ben and pulling his riding gauntlets and his own pair of goggles and leather riding helmet back on.

 

There was little opportunity for talk on the road, the combined roar of the engine and the wind making conversation next to impossible. But finally the long, low reaches of the AEF training camp came into view, and Caleb let off the gas to let them putter into the gate, giving his credentials, and Ben’s, to the sentry as Ben tried to to remember what it felt like to feel his fingers. He’d nearly lost his hat as they’d blazed out of town, and had spent the last several miles with one hand firmly around his hat brim and the other clamped as tight around his bag as possible. If that was a sample of his usual driving style, he pitied Caleb’s dispatches.

 

Caleb steered the puttering, bouncing motorbike through camp and around the stray soldier or errant dog until they were finally in front of the regimental HQ. Ben climbed out of the sidecar, glancing at the building and trying not to let a few months of repressed memories get the better of him. “Hey, Ben.” He turned to look at Caleb, finding that the older man was no longer angry, or afraid -- but rather had an apologetic smile. “He’ll be glad you’re back,” Caleb said with a slight smile. “We’re all glad you’re back.”

 

Ben nodded, hefting his bag onto his shoulder and stepping inside.

 

There was no other expression for it --HQ smelled like bureaucracy. Typewriter ribbons and filing cabinets and wool uniforms worn over dozens of male bodies washed with standard-issue soap in freezing cold showers, with the now-familiar smell of cigarettes and pipe tobacco added in for an additional air of _eau de l’homme._ No delicate perfumes here.

 

“Captain Tallmadge, here to see --”

 

“The Brigadier’s in meetings all morning; he won’t be able to see you,” the secretary said thinly, barely looking up from his typewriter, the dragon guarding the gate. “I’m sorry, Tallmadge, you’ll have to come back later.”

 

Trying not to look too disappointed, Ben nodded, picking up his bag and stepping back outside. Caleb was gone, probably off on his next dispatch run, so Ben walked, alone, back to his barracks, slinging his bag onto his bed and looking around. Empty beds -- everyone was probably out on maneuvers or drill. He spent the next half-hour unpacking, putting his footlocker back into order, rearranging his notes from his training course and making room amid his scant pile of belongings for several new books.

 

He had just taken off his boots to start digging into one of his new volumes when there was a tremendous commotion at the door and a large group of officers came inside, still talking amongst themselves.

 

“...hear about Mexico and Pancho Villa one more time, I’m going to kill him.”

 

“He’s not that bad, Alex, really.”

 

“No, I think he is,” Alex said strongly. “Just because he’s got field experience and the rest of us haven’t doesn’t make him God Almighty, and I think it’s high time someone told him that.”

 

Ben knew immediately of whom they were speaking -- Ben Arnold, one of the Bridgadier’s hand-picked officers, a man who’d already served his country in one fight and was now spoiling for another one -- and all too happy to share his experiences with anyone who would listen. Given the opportunity, Ben was sure there were quite a few men in the room who’d happily go on for days complaining about Arnold -- and he really didn’t want or need that on his first day back.

 

“What, no welcome flags for an old friend?” Ben asked, sitting up and waiting for the crowd to notice him. Heads turned, eyes just making out Ben’s still form as his uniform blended in with his blankets.

 

“Tallmadge!” The resulting football scrum threatened to overturn his bed as his friends and fellow officers overwhelmed him with hugs, pats on the back, handshakes, and other various and sundry forms of greeting.

 

“We thought for sure the Brits were going to kill you,” Alex confided. “So, are you going to single-handedly win the war now that you’ve successfully completed your trial by fire, or descent into hell, or whatever else they’re calling...wherever you went?”

 

“Field training, Hamilton -- it’s called field training,” Ben said, smiling at Alex’s flippant remarks. He’d missed this, while he’d been away, this easy camraderie with the other officers. They hadn’t much in common with each other six months ago, when they’d first met, apart from a few ROTC courses, and some training at the Plattsburg camps, and the fact that they were all college men, with degrees between them representing the cream of the American school system. In those first days it had been a lot of careful side-eyes as pennants and college rings were compared -- Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Princeton, Dartmouth, Pennsylvania-- but gradually the old fault lines died away as their instructors broke them down and built them up again. _Officers and gentlemen_ , they were told as they took yet another full-pack march on a blistering hot day after a few punches were thrown over some hasty words about the inadequacies of the Dartmouth starting line. _You are here to be officers and gentlemen. More is expected of you. You will be leading men into battle. They will look to you for guidance, for reassurance, for calm. There is no margin for error, and no space for petty feuds. Leave your old lives behind you, their instructors urged. You’re not New Yorkers and Minnesotans and Virginians now -- you’re all Americans._

 

And now they were - Americans first, and American _officers_ at that.

 

Well, nominally officers, anyway --if one chose to look at them when they were on the parade ground, and not in the private of their communal quarters exchanging jokes, as was now the case.

 

“Oh, hark at him,” Alex said, sitting up and holding his hands up in a mock-rhetorical gesture. “Field training! Careful, boys, or we’ll have another Arnold on our hands. Very well, oh Benjamin the great and glorious. Instruct us in your ways. Gather round, all, Father’s speaking.”

 

Ben had to laugh again. “I’m making my report to Washington later; I’m sure you’ll all have to read it. It’s nothing new.”

 

“So tell us about the Brits, then,” Tilghman, a tall and usually tight-lipped man from Pennsylvania, asked. “Are they all as useless as we think they are?”

 

“Some,” Ben said fairly. “And some are good officers, and good soldiers. They just...think about the war differently than we do. Take rifle practice, for instance -- we’ve all been taught to shoot. Pershing wanted riflemen, and he got them.  It’s not part of their program. They’d much rather have you use the bayonet. There was a lot of digging trenches, and codes, and map-reading and…: he trailed off, knowing he could go for hours, given the chance. “You’ll all just have to read the report. Now come on, what have I missed?”

 

“Apart from Arnold’s war stories?” Alex asked flippantly. Someone threw a pillow at him.

 

“We’ve got a new French liaison officer,” Laurens offered. “And you’ll never guess what his name is.”

 

“...Bonaparte?” Ben asked, at a loss.

 

“ _Lafayette,”_ Hamilton revealed with a smile. Ben’s face dropped.

 

“...What, like the Escadrille?” It was common enough for the Army men to heap derision on France’s ‘Knights of the Air’ and make jokes that the aviators were a bunch of millionaire playboys who wouldn’t know a fair fight if it came up and put a hole in their fuselage, but no one could argue that the newspapers at home seemed to love them.

 

Laurens nodded. “Apparently he’s a relation.”

 

“Of the airplane?” Ben asked, getting another pillow in the face for his trouble.

 

“No, of the guy they named it after - the Marquis de Lafayette. Fought in the Revolutionary War and all that. Of course he’s not a marquis any more, but he’s still got the house -- renting it out to some coal baron for the duration. Must be nice, owning a chateau.’

 

“Is he helpful. or….French?” Ben asked with healthy skepticism -- the last several liaison officers had been, to a man, snippy, abrasive, and bad-humored -- a bad match for a bunch of boisterous officers and soldiers still learning their trade while they learned to get along with one another.

 

“Well, I like him,” Laurens admitted with a shrug. “But I’m in the minority, I think.”

 

“That’s because you’re the only one who can talk to him,” Alex put in angrily. “They spend trainings talking behind their hands like schoolgirls. It’s insufferable.”

 

“He’s very friendly,” Tilghman allowed. “And the Brigadier likes him, which is really all that matters. He’s been in a bit of fighting and done well for himself, and it shows. He’s not just talking out of his ear.”

 

Ben nodded, and let the conversation drift to other things - the new French liason, the latest thou-shalt-nots from the Brigadier's desk (apparently Caleb had not been the only one indulging at Claudette’s) and the talk, always on the horizon, of a new offensive, a new push, a chance, finally, for them all to prove themselves instead of attending training after training and only playing at war.

 

The bell in the mess hall chimed for dinner, and Tallmadge and the rest joined the mad rush for the officer’s mess, tucking into food that only Ben, after three weeks of British mess hall food, found appetizing. Then back to quarters, to read and study and play cards and throw darts and write letters. Ben excused himself from this, preferring, instead, to take a walk, taking in the quiet of the camp as night fell.

 

He was fond of walking, a habit begun at home by his father, who liked a stroll home after church on a Sunday, and cultivated at Yale, where he would take to campus long after everyone else had gone to bed to hammer out his thoughts for his latest paper, or school editorial, or argument with friends. Ben Tallmadge liked the quiet -- and there’d been precious little of that up the line at the Field School. Walking at night was discouraged -- and even if he had been permitted his midnight strolls, the uneven ground and the none-too-distant guns left little room for serenity.

 

Here in Gondrecourt, however, the front was far enough away that the guns were only a dull roar in the distance, the earth immune to the shaking of the shells. If a man studied the horizon carefully he could see the flashes and time them to the noise, but there was no immediacy, no imminent threat of looming death. Only the monotony of training, and the flashes on the horizon, promising a war but never delivering it.

 

He circled back to the Officer’s Mess, hoping for another cup of coffee before turning in. The room was mainly empty, save for a single figure, sitting in his shirtsleeves with his uniform jacket draped over the back of a nearby chair, hunched over a piece of paper and a recently opened letter, which he was consulting from time to time. A piece of pie and a cup of coffee sat, forgotten, just to the left of his hand. Ben was reminded for a moment of his father, sitting at the kitchen table at home in Setauket, composing sermons. But the paper in front of Brigadier General Washington was hardly a sermon -- unless, Ben thought to himself, it was another memorandum to the officers on the benefits of staying away from Claudette’s.

 

Ben cleared his throat, hoping to catch his attention, and then stopped himself. _This is probably the first quiet moment he’s had all day,_ Ben realized, feeling guilty. The man looked up, smiling, and Ben felt more guilty still. “Didn't mean to disturb you, sir,” he offered, weakly.

 

“Not at all, Tallmadge, not at all,” The General said, indicating the empty seat in front of him with the implication that his junior officer should join him. “Sorry I missed you, earlier --  but General Pershing will have his reports. Coffee? I”m sure there’s a warm cup somewhere.”

 

“Thank you, sir, no,” Ben said, sitting down and trying not to look as uncomfortable as he felt. “Another report, sir?” he asked, indicating the paper.

 

Washington smiled again. "Of a kind -- a letter home,” he explained. “My wife's been threatening to come over - she claims I don't write often enough. She says she's …: he consulted the letter again, smiling as he quoted, “” ‘bored with bandages, sick of socks, and may be moved to violence if she has to attend another charity luncheon, fundraising concert, or tea-dance for the Belgian refugee fund.’ "

 

Ben recalled the picture on his commanding officer’s desk -- a petite, dark-haired woman with a resolute smile and intelligent eyes, the sort who in earlier days would have been best described using words like ‘regal’. It wasn’t hard to make a link between the picture and the images formed by the Bridgadier’s frequent, fond mentions of his wife. "Sounds like quite a workload, sir."

 

"Martha likes to keep busy -- and she never met a cause she couldn't organize,” The General related fondly. “She suggests she may try the YMCA -- they need canteen volunteers, apparently."

 

"Those cookies she sent were very tasty, sir," Ben offered, remembering, at Christmas time, the enormous box of stale-but-still-somewhat edible sweets Mrs. General, as she was sometimes jokingly referred to, had shipped to France for her husband to distribute to his officers. They had been packed alongside dozens of socks, wristlets, and sweaters, each knitted lovingly by some member of her women's war work committee -- and a great many by Mrs. General herself.  It made Ben smile to think of stately Mrs Washington, at home in her palatial home among the Virginia elite, knitting socks like the poorest toothless grandmother in the backwoods, and conversing with her friends about the latest developments in Europe. One formed the image that Mrs. Washington, unlike others of her kind, would likely be able to discuss events in great, and clear-eyed, detail.

 

Washington smiled. "I'll tell her you said that, Tallmadge; she'll like hearing it." He laid pen and paper aside and folded his hands in front of him, ready to listen. "But enough about that -- I want to hear about your course."

 

Ben was in constant amazement at Brigadier Washington’s ability to command -- a room, a meeting, a battlefield. Everywhere he went the man seemed in perfect control. And even though Ben had spent a good deal of his time on the train mentally reviewing his notes and rehearsing what he was going to say, he found himself at an immediate loss. “Ah...good, sir. Good. The British were...very kind hosts. I learned a great deal.”

 

“Good,” Washington said. “All of it useful, I hope.”

 

Ben glanced at his hands. “Permission to speak freely, sir?”

 

His commanding officer smiled. “Granted.”

 

“Their tactics are very different from ours, sir,” Ben began. “All the...the rifle training, the drill....it’s just that they don’t emphasize that quite as much, sir. There’s more...hand to hand stuff. And more duck-and-cover. Didn’t...quite feel...soldierly, sir.”

 

Washington nodded. “What did you think of their instructors?”

 

Ben thought back, remembering faces and names and thinking how best to describe them. “Hewlett’s an...able man, sir. Bit of a martinet -- staff type, very starchy. Some of his officers don’t like him -- think he’s too by the book, doesn’t have enough field experience. But his methods are solid.” An aristocrat, he wanted to say. Born to rule and sacrifice. Very old school. And so he was -- Edmund Hewlett was one of those minor nobles English society seemed to be overflowing with, a young man who had gone straight from the playing fields of Eton to the sunny banks of Oxford to the war-rooms of the Western Front, complete with pencil mustache, immaculate uniforms, and swagger stick.

 

“And some of them…” He trailed off, thinking, now, of Captain Simcoe, a tall man with red hair who seemed the sort who would have been marked for death in this war of crouching and crawling where the shorter man was at an advantage.  Maybe it was the three years of constant crouching that had coiled up the temper that lurked behind Simcoe’s eyes -- or maybe he’d always been that way. Opinions seemed to vary. The other British officers tended to give him a wide berth, giving out all manner of wild tales about trench raids and unspeakable brutalities - bodies hacked limb from limb, messages written in blood for the returning defenders to find. If that was what this war did to men, Ben was afraid of what they’d look like when this was over. True, Simcoe knew his business -- but his business was different from Hewlett’s -- and Ben wasn’t really sure which of the two had the right of it.

 

“Some of them have been out here a long time,” he said, diplomatically avoiding what he had meant to say.

 

“ So you found them...old-fashioned.” Washington summarized, studying the captain with a careful eye. Ben nodded.  “I thought that might be the case.”

 

“Well, sir, it’s only that…” Ben paused, trying to think of the best way to put this. “I can’t help thinking that if they’ve been at it for three years, sir, and this is the way they’ve been fighting so far -- is it going to help if we do the same thing?”

 

His commanding officer smiled. “I knew there was a reason to send you, Tallmadge. Those are my thoughts exactly -- and General Pershing’s, too, you should know. The training camp was a show of good faith -- those methods have served those men well in the buisness of survival -- a good thing, of course, to promote. But survival and winning are two different things. Especially out here.” He gave a small shrug. “And I think the Brits have forgotten that. I’ll be interested to read your full report, and I’m sure your fellow officers will be glad of the instruction.”

 

“Is there any news of an offensive, sir?” Ben could not help but ask. Washington’s face turned meditative.

 

“No,” he admitted. “Pershing talks to Foch, Foch talks to Haig, Haig asks for reinforcements, Pershing asks for a front, Foch ignores everyone. It’s the same story we’ve been hearing -- we’re not well-trained enough to trust with our own line, but just trained enough to fill in someone else’s, apparently. And Pershing won’t allow that.” He snorted, adding, with a sigh,  “I begin to appreciate why we revolted in the first place. It’s not in our national character to take orders from men who don't have to live under them themselves.”

 

The observation made Ben smile, and afforded Washington a chance to check his wrist watch and gape at the time. “Later than I thought,” he realized. “Martha will just have to wait a little longer for commendations to her cooking. I’ll look forward to reading your report, Tallmadge, when it comes. I think it's time the both of us were in bed.”

 

“Of course, sir. Thank you.” He watched Washington gather up his dishes and move them to the counter for some early - rising diahwasher to attend, collect his hat, coat, and letters, and make his way out into the now silent camp, leaving Ben alone, once more, in the mess.

 

How did that poem of Kipling's go? _“If you can talk with crowds and keep your virtue,_ _  
_ _Or walk with Kings---nor lose the common touch…”_ His father had read that to him often as a boy, but Ben hadn't realized, until meeting Washington, that there were, in this world, real men who lived and worked as the poem advised. He was the patient paterfamilias - resolute in battle, uncompromising in debate, but still accessible, still human underneath. He knew that his men were men, and subject to the demands of their humanity - even if he sometimes asked them to hold themselves to a higher standard than usual. Pershing might be a remote philosopher, but Washington at least took the time to learn his men.

 

Ben picked himself up from his chair and realized, with a start, how tired he really was. A whole day spent on trains had worn him out. Washington was right - war and the rest tomorrow, but sleep first.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Fun historical fact: Several American officers referred to the winter spent at the training camps at Gondrecourt as "The Valley Forge Winter." Living in hastily built, poorly constructed barracks and without much-needed winter supplies (or the ships to get them to France, or the traincars to get them to Gondrecourt) the AEF had a very large supply issue. Obviously, the parallels to Washington's Army in Pennsylvania were not lost on them.


	2. Missing, Presumed Killed (Benjamin Tallmadge, Nathan Hale, George Washington)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> "Missing, presumed killed." Chilling words for anyone to read. Men go missing in battles all the time -- but how does a man like Nathan Hale simply disappear?
> 
> After the battle is over, Ben is contemplating disappearances.

It’s been a week, and Ben still can’t stop seeing Nathan in the dug-out. His friend is everywhere – in the arrangement of the cups on the shelves, the poems tacked, painstakingly, to the crossbeams of the walls, in the pile of books on Ben’s bedside crate. They took the second cot away a few days ago, replacing it with crates of supplies, but every time Ben looks at that side of the room he can still see Nathan there, nose stuck in a book, as usual, or penciling in yet another terrible poem. Where are all of his poems? Ben wonders. Probably in his footlocker – probably on the way home to his parents.

When he closes his eyes he can still hear the creep of the artillery barrage, feel the shaking of the ground, the numbers on the face of his watch the only thing he can see, watching the seconds tick, tick, tick away, whistle poised to send the signal. The hand hits its mark, he blows the whistle, they go over the top.

As an intelligence officer Nathan’s observing the whole battle for Washington – here, there, and everywhere all at once. Pershing will have his reports. It’s the only way to learn, he says, and Washington agrees with him. Reports on movements, of troop performance, of tactics – of the dead. All the stories a battlefield can tell. They asked, afterwards, who had seen him, and everyone had a word to say about noble Captain Hale, looking just like a young officer ought to look, full of vigor and with that blazing smile that always got him into trouble at school, helmet half-cocked, notepad in hand. “Aren’t you afraid of getting shot, sir?” someone reported asking him. Nathan had smiled, he said. “My only regret is that they can only kill me once, Private,” he’d answered back, disappearing into the smoke. That was the last time anyone had seen him alive.

Again the artillery barrage. He’d turn the gramophone on, but that, too, has Nathan all over it, dancing like a lunatic to the same records, played over and over again. They’d spent hours talking about what they’d do when they got home – the girls they’d dance with, the wine they’d drink, the dances they’d spin through and the kisses they’d steal.

His hand is shaking as he reads the after-action report, glad, for once, that Sergeant Sackett has offered to type. His voice hitches on ‘Hale, Nathan, Captain, Intelligence Officer’ and for moment, the dugout is silent. He dictates the rest of the report quicker than the Sergeant can type and goes outside to fumblingly light a cigarette.

“Can I trouble you for a light, Tallmadge?” Ben looks up to find Washington stooping on the duckboards next to him, slouching in his greatcoat and trying to keep his conspicuously tall head below the line of the earthworks. Ben obliges, sharing his match to light Washington’s pipe, and invites his commander to join him on the crates that serve as a bench and thinking post. “A soft night, my wife would call it,” Washington observes, puffing at his pipe and observing the sky. “You can almost see the stars tonight.”

Ben looks heavenward, expecting to be disappointed –but tonight there are no clouds, no smoke – only the inky curtain of the night, spangled above with tiny bits of light. “I was sorry to hear about Captain Hale,” Washington said, to no one in particular, puffing on his pipe. “He was a good officer.”

“Sir.” Ben’s voice is tight in his throat.

“Lieutenant Brewster said…you’d been having a bad time of it. Asked me to drop by.”

“Hope he wasn’t flippant about it, sir.” It’s the only thing Ben can think of to say – somehow he feels betrayed by Caleb, and yet, achingly glad. He hasn’t talked to anyone, and Washington…He wishes he were more like Washington, sometimes, imperturbable.

Washington gave a faint smile. “Certainly not.”

For a while there is only companionable silence. The general’s good at that. “What is it all for, sir? All this? What is…what is it all for?”

“How do you think Captain Hale would have answered that question?” Washington asked, playing Socrates.

Ben scrubbed at his eyes, his mind searching all of Nathan’s often quoted lines, his poems, his favorite books. “I asked him the same question before I gave him his assignment,” the General said.  "Asked him why he was here, what he wanted to accomplish. Do you know what he said? _Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori._ “ The Latin seemed to hang, luminous, in the air, smelling of schoolrooms and the library at Yale - of simpler days. “It is sweet and right to die for one’s country.” Ben could taste the words on his tongue even before Washington had uttered them.

“Horace,” Ben repeated. He could see the book on the shelf in Nathan’s room in the dormitory, all the penciled scribbles in the margins. “Do you believe that, sir?” _Can death ever be sweet and right?_

“No,” Washington said plainly. Ben stared. “Death is never sweet, Tallmadge, even for the dead. It’s bitter, through and through. But Captain Hale believed that – or wanted to. And we should make it so, for him.” He took another puff of his pipe, observing the sky once more. “All men die, Tallmadge. Some of us want that to mean something – though we seldom, I think, control what it is. Though it doesn’t make it hurt any less.”

Ben nodded, taking another draw from his cigarette to steady his nerves. “I’m giving you a pass to Paris,” Washington announced, softly. “Three days. Take Lieutenant Brewster with you and go open a bottle of whatever Hale liked drinking. He was the sort of man who would have liked that, don’t you think?”

“And a girl, sir?” Ben asked, feeling fractious. (There was always a girl, with Nathan, a different one every time, but Ben only had one, at the American Hospital, and suddenly he was sick for not seeing her. In the last week he’d been so preoccupied with remembering Nathan’s face that he’d forgotten hers.)

Washington’s smile was slim, but the amusement in his eyes was unmistakable. “I’ll pretend I didn’t hear that,” he said fairly, handing over the pass. “But if you think it right…” He left the word hanging in the air, and left Ben with the stars, and the smoke from his cigarette, disappearing with the wind.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Dulce et Decorum Est, a paraphrase from Horace, is perhaps best known for its use in Wilfred Owen's poem of the same name, but it also shows up on the tombstone of John Laurens, a different man fighting in a very different war. I thought the parallel too good to pass up.
> 
> The scenario outlined in this chapter - an officer disappearing in the heavy fire of battle - is a real one, and based on a true story, that of George Haydock, an intelligence officer with the 28th Infantry Regiment of the First Division. He died at the battle of Cantigny, in 1918.
> 
> Haydock's story, as well as the stories of four more officers from the First Division, can be read in James Carl Nelson's book "Five Lieutenants: The Heartbreaking Story of Five Harvard Men who led America to Victory in World War One."


	3. She's My Yankee Doodle Joy (George/Martha Washington)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> I've got a Yankee Doodle Sweetheart,  
> She's my Yankee Doodle Joy.

“Yes?” The Brigadier looked up, testily, from his papers again and fixed the sentry with a snarl.

“Please, sir, but the…the YMCA matron wants to talk to you.”

Washington looked down at his papers, up at the sentry, down again, and then threw his pencil down on the map he’d been marking, picking up his jacket and marching outside, his irritation extreme. Ben followed, wondering if the poor YMCA matron had quite counted on being shouted out by a member of senior staff and whether someone should summon a medic, in case blows were exchanged.

“Madam,” Washington had begun talking to himself before he’d even left the office, his voice low and deadly, yanking his coat onto his shoulders and screwing on his hat. “I have a war to run, and I do not have time to find you huts, stoves, zouave uniforms, or whatever other tomfool notions you may have as regards the welfare of my…”

They were outside now, the caravan parked just outside of headquarters. The back of one of the trucks was already open, a smiling lady in her middle years passing out cigarettes while the woman who must have been in charge looked on with pleasure, her back to the door. Washington pulled up short, and Ben, in quickstep behind him, nearly ran into his commanding officer. For a moment no one spoke. And then the lady turned, and smiled. Ben gaped.

He hadn’t ever realized that the woman in the Brigadier’s wedding photos was quite so short – though as he was sitting and she standing at his shoulder, the mistake was a strange one to make. But the resemblance was unmistakable.

“George!” She announced, her smile like the sun. “Your sentry said you would not wish to see me, but I soon disabused him of the notion.”

George (Ben had almost forgotten that ‘General’ was not, in fact, a first name) blanched, blushed, and then, almost hesitantly, smiled, as if he were not quite sure what he was seeing. “Martha?”

“Do long-absent spouses not get kisses? Or is that against regulations?” Martha asked pertly, and Ben, still behind his commander, had to stifle a smile. Martha Washington, it would appear, was an older model of what his mother would have called ‘a spitfire.’

“How…did you get here?” Washington asked, still, apparently, a little in shock, stooping a little to collect a peck on the cheek. It was an alarmingly human gesture from a man Ben had long become accustomed to seeing as superhuman, burning the candle at both ends with little thought for his own comfort.

“The same as everyone else, dear – transatlantic steamer from New York to La Havre. And then by truck.” She made a vague gesture at the caravan of Liberty trucks behind her.

“You hate boats.”

“Not quite as much as I hate charity luncheons,” Mrs. Washington said tartly, making Ben hide yet another smile – this one considerably larger and accompanied by a laugh. (He succeeded only in snorting, which he then attempted to turn into a cough.) “And a great deal less than I hate being away from you,” she added with a fond smile. Ben thought he saw her husband smile at that. “I managed.”

“Are you…planning on staying? I’m afraid I can’t…in camp…”

“We will be stationed in town; I’ll be staying at the facilities the Y has arranged for us,” Martha announced. “I know how _particular_ the army is about hospitality,” she added with a knowledgeable grin that Ben almost wished he hadn’t seen. (They _would_ make jokes about Pershing’s mistress, but his wife was dead.) “Though I would not say no to a tour,” she added. “And some…introductions.” She glanced, expectantly, around Washington’s shoulder at Ben.

Washington remembered there were other people in the vicinity and took a step back. “Captain – Major, actually, Tallmadge, my chief of intelligence. Major Tallmadge – my wife, Mrs. Washington.”

She held out a hand, and the two shook – her grip was firm, for a woman’s, and her gaze was clear and direct, obviously trying to place him. Ben remembered the General saying that there weren’t too many things that escaped his wife’s notice, and he could see now that it was true. She might well have been a _grande dame_ of society in both Richmond and the District of Columbia, but she was far from ornamental. She shook hands like  a person who got things done. “Tallmadge – Ah, yes. The cookies I sent. Splendid to finally meet you.”

“Ma’am,” Ben said, finally letting his smile out. She moved on, gently berating her husband into an introduction to every member of his staff still in the office, leaving Ben outside.

 _We should let **her** at the Germans_ , he thought to himself. _I don’t think they’d stand a chance._


	4. If You Were The Only Girl In the World (Anna/Hewlett)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> From a prompt from @calamity-bean on tumblr: "Write something Annlett from the WWI AU...? Their first meeting, perhaps?"
> 
> Behold - one alternate timeline first meeting for Major Hewlett and Mrs. Strong -- or, as she's known in this universe, Anna LeFort.

He’d been in France for nine months before he took his first leave. Due every three, his superiors had chirped disapprovingly at him. Strain of command takes a toll on a man’s health. Need a bit of rest every once in a while, what!

But Edmund Hewlett did not believe in rest, especially when it was his men who were fighting and dying and with no chance themselves to get home but at the short end of a bullet or the sharp end of a bayonet. And perhaps, just perhaps, if he showed that he was not as soft as they thought he was, if he soldiered through and kept his head up, perhaps they would like him a little more.

He wasn’t deaf – he knew his captains thought him useless, his lieutenants found him ineffective, and his NCOs…well, the less repeated from them the better. He shuddered to think of what his superiors thought of him, but he could not hear what they said back at HQ. What they said in the dugouts, and on the duckboards, though…that was a different story. The Oyster Major, they whispered behind their backs, an unfortunate epithet bestowed after a hamper from Fortnum and Masons, carefully selected by his mother, had accidentally upended itself while being unloaded from the mail lorry. Biscuits and jam and tea and a thousand other little comforts, but what had rolled to Lieutenant Wakefield’s feet? Tinned oysters. Simcoe had picked it up and smiled before handing it back to Wakefield, who passed it, mortified, to the Major – but that had been enough. _Oysters,_ Simcoe had railed in the officer’s dugout that night as though it were the funniest thing in the world. _Middle of a bloody war and his mother sends him oysters.  His mother!_

Edmund had written to her not to send any hampers after that, and told her he’d rather gone off oysters. She wrote back disappointed that he had forgotten how he used to love them as a child, and he felt it bitterly but dared not explain why. _My men are in the habit of heckling me_. It would not look good on paper, especially for a Hewlett.

He had not wanted to join the Army. Oxford was to have been his home, free to read his books, write his papers, and study his stars. But that was not good enough for General Hewlett, who had been in Afghanistan and South Africa and India, and thought it his duty that any son of his should give the same, a life spent in service to Queen (or King) and Country. So Edmund had fumbled through the OTC, the camps at Tideworth, the dozens of dinners spent listening to his father and his friends tell old war stories, each more bloodthirsty and battle-tattered than the last. He’d gone in a Captain, quickly promoted as the mind spent calculating the strength and distance of stars had proved its worth allocating shipping tonnage and figuring ammunition per man. And he obeyed. They gave him orders and he followed them. The Army liked men like that, so they’d given him a command and to hell with what he wanted.

He could not watch the stars here in France. Too much smoke, too many phosphorus flares, too much heavy artillery fire for the finely calibrated lenses of his telescope. He’d brought a small, cheap model out with him, hoping to catch a few spare hours, but when he’d brought it from its case the shock waves from the shelling had misaligned the mirrors. Damn.

Without the telescope there seemed to be little reason for him to take the leave allotted to him, and so he’d stayed, until his General insisted he take a week off, practically shoving the train ticket into his hand. Paris, man, at least, he’d urged. So Hewlett had gone to Paris, the name of a reputable hotel scrawled on a slip of paper in his pocket. He would drink some wine, and read some books, and try not to think about what he would tell his parents when he next wrote home and explained that he had chosen not to visit them.

The Hotel Marianne was tucked into a side street, a tiny establishment with an antique sign over the door with the image of the Republic, wild-haired Marianne (complete with Phrygian cap and classical drape) welcoming an unseen guest.

The  _propriétaire_ ****was at the counter, concentration deep in a ledger. There was a picture on the counter behind her – a _poilu_ in the _uniforme nationale_ of 1914, with the old style zouave trousers and the kepi hat. There was a black ribbon across the corner of the frame. Her husband, doubtless. Edmund felt, for a moment, very intrusive.

“Ah…bonjour. Je…voudrais…un cham-brrr, s'il vous plait.”

“Single room or double?” She asked in perfectly serviceable English, looking up from her book. Edmund nearly took a step back.

“Single,” he replied, taken aback. “I’m terribly sorry, ma'am, but are you…American?”

She fixed him with a cool look. “I can give you the name of another hotel,” she said calmly, and Edmund realized how that had sounded.

“No, of course, I didn’t…This shall be quite sufficient.”

She nodded, pushing the guest book at him to sign while she pulled a key down from the wall. “Second floor?”

He crossed his ts and set down the pen. “Actually, have you…have you got anything higher?” She looked strangely at him. “I’d like to…be able to get to the roof, if possible,” he explained. Perhaps, if he could, he might just spend some time out in the open air.

Her stern glare softened a little, and she nodded, replacing the key and pulling down another. “Of course. Just this way.”

The highest floor the Hotel Marianne had to offer was the fourth; she unlocked the door for him and ushered him inside. “Hot water is limited, but we’re low on guests, so there’s not much competition. I can serve breakfast for a small fee.”

Edmund, meanwhile, was studying the room – bed, washbasin, small desk, small window. “Would you like to see the roof?” she asked suddenly, and the question brought him out of his reverie.

The stairs to the roof were just across the hall, musty and badly lit. When they emerged on the rooftop, Edmund could swear the air felt a little cleaner. There was a clothesline, a dilapidated washing wringer, a few caned chairs showing their age. The space felt strangely intimate, as though he were seeing something he shouldn’t. “I let my laundry air here, but you’re welcome whenever you like,” she offered, clearly trying to offer him something that meant more to her than it did to him.  "My…husband liked the roof, when he was home,“ she said finally, her face sad. “He’d been buried by a shellburst, early on. Didn’t like being…” She let the sentence die, unsure of her words, and, just like that, she was heading back down the stairs, leaving Edmund alone, considering how it would feel to be buried alive.

He decided he would have liked the roof, too.

He went back down to his room eventually, the fresh air almost too invigorating after weeks of sweat and cordite and the burnt sharpness of the battlefield. He unpacked his case, hanging his shirts just so and lining his shaving kit up on the marble rim of the washbasin. There was hardly a need to change for dinner; he hadn’t brought anything else to wear save his uniform. A little water on his face, a quick brush through his hair, a minute adjustment to his tie, and he was ready to venture out for food.

He took his time going down, pausing, on the landing of the second floor, to admire a painting in the hallway, one he hadn’t seen on his way down. Marianne again, almost in the style of David’s, rallying the citizens in the street. This Marianne lacked the immediacy of the David and the martial spirit, her encouragement more of a maternal kind, hand held up in welcome, as if encouraging, not the crowd behind her, but the viewer. Studying her face, Hewlett thought it seemed familiar, until at last it occurred to him that this was, possibly, the woman at the desk downstairs.

She was still at the concierge’s desk, her head back in her ledgers. Hewlett laid his key on the counter with the dullest of clangs. “My thanks, Madame….I’m sorry, I don’t think I caught your name,” he apologized.

“Madame LeFort.”

That means ‘The Strong’ he thought to himself, parsing through his schoolboy French. “Major Edmund Hewlett, at your service.” She nodded in thanks, and he considered for a moment, before continuing. “Might I…ask a question?” Her eyes rose back to his, cautiously inquisitive. “The painting, in the hallway, the Marianne – am I correct in thinking…that’s you?

The caution in her eyes softened a bit at the compliment of being recognized. "I posed for a friend, while he was at university. He gave my husband the painting as a present. It was one of his favorite possessions.”

“It’s a very good likeness,” Edmund offered. She smiled a little at that. “Good night, Madame LeFort.” She nodded a silent farewell and returned soundlessly to her bookkeeping.

He could not help studying the women he passed in the streets, sat nearby in the restaurant where he ate dinner. They seemed foriegn to him, a race unknown after being so long among men, smiling and fluttering their eyelashes and flashing their eyes. Beautiful faces like pearls, like ivory, sitting in their dark suits as if in national mourning for the men and battles already lost. Somber, but still resplendent. But none seemed to rival the Marianne on the stairs, and the dark, clever eyes of Madam LeFort, studying him from across her desk, pitying him on the roof.

He didn’t need that pity, but he found himself wishing for more of it.


	5. Femme Avec Blanchissage, Matin (Anna/Hewlett)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Edmund Hewlett, foiled astronomer and frustrated artist, is on leave again and once more at the Hotel Marianne with the redoubtable Madame LeFort...whom he is, somewhat against his better judgement, perhaps...beginning to admire, a little?

He hasn’t picked up a drawing pencil in years, yet he finds himself, over breakfast, idly sketching in the column of his newspaper with a stub of pencil. There is the barest suggestion of a face, a shoulder, a wisp of hair – Edmund stops and sees who it begins to resemble, and he rips it off, pitches it into the gutter. (The waiter, seeing this, does not smile – Paris is full of petulant artists and he has better things to do than pick up failed attempts at greatness.)

 

He leaves his centimes and his half-read newspaper on the table and walks home with his hands stuffed into his pockets, fingers still electric with the urge to move, to create. It’s been so long since his mind did anything it enjoyed doing, and he enjoyed drawing, once, back in school, before his father said it was a silly pasttime for schoolgirls and sodomites and he wasn’t going to have any son of his frittering away his time in parks sketching.

But his father’s not here.

He sees a lovely tablet of drawing paper in the window of a shop and impulsively decides to buy it, along with a set of real pencils, then spends the rest of the day by the river abusing piece after piece of paper. (By the end of the day his ducks finally look like ducks, and there are even hints of faces in the people, not just stooped shoulders and flat caps and scarves on heads.)

The next morning he wakes up, early, and takes his pad up to the roof. The skyline opens up as the sun rises, and his pencil skates over rooflines, windows, laundry, the odd house-wife or two leaning out of the casements trying to find a bit of new air for their crowded, dingy rooms.

He’s been up so long in the silence of the waking city the scream of the un-greased door makes him jump. “Sorry!” Madame LeFort exclaims. “I didn’t think…you’d be up here.” There’s a massive basket of laundry in her arms, which she hustles up to the roof and deposits near her wringer.

“I’m terribly sorry, I’ll leave,” Edmund says, half-rising from his chair, very conscious that his coat is downstairs and his suspenders are hanging. (He hadn’t been expecting visitors.) “Oh!” A few loose sheets of paper drift off his lap, and they both rush to catch them before the wind picks them up. She looks at the picture in his hand and gives a short, amused laugh.

“You’ve gotten Madame Duclos, all right.” She passes the sheet back to him, a sketch of the ruddy-cheeked, buxom matron from across the alley at her morning dishes. “She’ll take the pattern right off those plates.”   
Edmund inserts the loose page back into the book, gathering up his things and taking a step towards the door. “Please stay, Major. I don’t often have company.” Her smile is genuine, and he slinks back to his chair, still feeling intrusive. “Have you always been an artist, then?

"Not really. My father disapproved.”

“That is what fathers do, isn’t it? My friend the artist had one very much like yours. Didn’t want him to come to Paris. Said the city was too revolutionary.”

Edmund smiled at that. “How did you come to be in Paris, Madame LeFort?” There must be a story there, a beautiful young American woman in a city like this with a French husband.

Her face closed a little, and he realized he’d asked a question she would rather not have answered. “My husband was a Parisian. I married him and moved here to help run the hotel.” A quick answer – efficient and vague. There would be no qualifications, no further explanations.

He fumbled for another question, less intrusive. “Do you miss it? America?”

“Sometimes. But not often. When I first came to Paris everything I loved was here. New York is a city of many attractions, but she’s not…not Paris.” Her smile was sad, and quickly hidden as she turned back to her laundry line. Edmund turned back to sketching the pigeons, and tried not to be distracted by the back of her neck, the little wisps of hair, the fine line of her shoulders as she hung her laundry.

He wanted to know more – had she met the Parisian husband in New York, and followed him here? Something in her story said no. And the way she spoke of the artist, who was not French and who had a disapproving father – was there something there? Had she been his lover, perhaps, running away with him to Paris when the father barred the marriage?

Edmund shook his head. The city was clearly working some kind of spell on him, if he was forming all these silly romantic stories around a woman he didn’t know. It was probably nothing like that at all.

All the same, he found himself sketching her hanging the laundry, seeing the painting on the wall of the National Gallery form itself under his pencil– in the style of one of those impressionists, perhaps. 

_Woman with Laundry, Morning._


	6. If You Were The Only Girl In the World, Part 2 (Anna/Hewlett)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Another prompt fill from @calamity-bean, using the prompts 'good enough' and 'Fever.'
> 
> Anna begins to learn a little more about her newest regular resident.

 

* * *

Anna LeFort had not expected to like Major Hewlett.

Paris was full of officers, out on leave, and walking into her hotel that first morning, he merely been one of them, and she had expected little else from him but swagger and cigar smoke and sly smiles and hands in places they did not need to be. The embodiment of English public school priveledge, the product of a class raised to know, instinctively, that the world and everything in it was theirs for the taking. She’d learned, quickly, how to dress her hair to appear older, how to pinch her face and frown, to keep her words quick and precise, to cultivate a coldness around her that kept all but the most determined at bay. Consoling a pretty widow had a kind of allure to them, and she made sure that she at no time looked as if she were in need of any kind of consolation.

But then he checked into his room without looking her over as though she were a peice of meat he were thinking about buying, without the side-eyed smirks and invitations to dinner. And then he asked her about the roof.

She had so little room in the hotel that was truly her own. Everything was built out for the benefit of the guests, her own small apartment on the ground floor, near the kitchen, an odd hodgepodge of second-hand furniture deemed too shabby to stay upstairs. The one sanctuary left to her was the roof.

The city didn’t sit well on Anna – she’d grown up in the country, and was used to light, to air. Little alleys and grubby windows made her long for home, for the breeze in the apple orchard and the sun gently drying the laundry on the line. But outside, where the air moved, where there was still some quiet left – there was where she was at peace.

Selah had never disturbed her up there, dismissing it as he might dismiss the laundry room or the kitchen, another woman’s space he needn’t have bothered with, and go back to the parlor to talk with his friends about the rights of the worker and the equality of man. And what about women, she always wanted to ask? But there never seemed to be any time. So she retreated to the roof with her bedsheets and towels and thought nothing more about it, until he came home that first winter, cowering and frightened, eyes nervously darting to every corner, every noise, pacing like one of the lions at the zoo until she finally suggested he go outside.

Some days she could see see him pacing in between the rows of sheets, puffing at his pipe, brow furrowed, shoulders bent. Some days she would swear she still could still hear his breathing, hear the sound of his boots.

The shellburst hadn’t killed him outright, but it had killed something inside of him.

And when Major Hewlett asked, politely, if he might take a room higher up the building, she thought of Selah and his pacing and his nervous, restless spirit, and decided to offer him the solace of her one, private space.

He kept to himself, in the main, bade her good morning and good evening when they passed in the corridors, held doors open for her, smiled in passing. And, at the end of that week of leave, he left, paying his bill in full and asking, ever so politely, if he might stay again, as if he were a guest in her house and not in her hotel. She nodded.

And that was enough.

He did not write  – some of them had, before she’d learned to cultivate her coldness – but she found herself thinking of him as she read the newspapers and followed the lines on the map, the names of the battles etched into her brain.

When he returned, some three or four months later, he was not the same man -  older now, his face somehow more lined, his uniform more lived in, his boots muddy, his stare distant. Paler, too, as if he’d just been ill recently. Still just as polite, just as reserved – but she sensed in him the same change she’d seen in Selah – that something in him had died out there, something had been lost. One day, while she was changing the towels in his room, her elbow clipped the edge of his portfolio and sent it tumbling. She hastened to pick it up, trying not to look.

Horrible images, grotesque in the extreme, mangled limbs and gaping faces, the ruins of houses and skeletons of trees. Everywhere, death. But here and there something not quite so horrid – a bird perched on the side of a dugout, a few men huddled around a little stove, making tea, a fumbling self-portrait, half abandoned. (His nose was not quite so big, and he was being unkind to his smile; it was not as bad looking as he’d made it out at all.)

She tucked them back in the portfolio and tried to forget.

What things he must have seen – must have felt! Selah had never spoken to her of his time at the front, but in his dreams he leapt and shouted and ran away from things he couldn’t see, and she knew he was holding back. And when she heard the same sounds coming from the Major’s room that night, she didn’t hesitate with the door. He was not thrashing, as Selah had, but every movement still spoke of the same pain.

“Major! Major!” His skin was feverish, clammy with sweat, and it was a struggle to hold him, shake him from sleep. He came out of his dream gasping for breath, eyes wide, pulse racing, looking wildly around the room for answers, for reassurance, trying to remember how to speak.

“Madam LeFort, I’m terribly…I hope I didn’t wake…”

She shook her head, settling her shawl around her shoulders again. “I was just going to bed myself,” she offered, hoping it sounded true. (She’d been listening in the corridor every night before she went to bed, hoping she would not hear what she felt certain she might.) “I hope you…didn’t think it too forward of me to come in. My husband…”

His smile was too much for words. “I remember. Thank you.”

And that, too, was enough.


	7. The Rose of No-Man's Land (Anna/Hewlett)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> This wasn't always Anna LeFort's life.
> 
> (A bit of backstory, and a kiss.)

She grew to expect Major Hewlett’s visits, every three or four months. Not with the expectation of a lover - that would have been an imposition – but rather more like that of a brother, or a very old friend. And she thought he, too, looked forward to them. There was something secure in it, something quiet and comforting in his presence that she had not felt for a long, long time.

Not with Selah, no – Selah and she had rumbled along as best they could in their marriage, but it was not, to borrow a famous phrase, a marriage of true minds. They managed because they had to – or rather, she had managed. For Selah had been in love with her far more than she had been in love with him.

 

 

It had been a simple thing, an easy thing, to run away from home with Abe, listening to him talk about ideals and art and freedom, and how she was his muse and how they could accomplish anything together. In the first few months, in the first year, even, it had been enough. She found a job as a waitress, and he sold some of his sketches and paintings, and they had a tiny room in Montmartre that was cheap and drafty but theirs. They had friends. They went to parties and drank cheap wine and discussed the downfall of capitalism and the rise of the socialist state and the coming day for the artist.

Or rather, Abe and his friends talked about all those things, and Anna…found herself drifting away from him.  Slowly, at first, and then further and further, until when his father came to drag him home. She could still see Richard Woodhull’s broad, frock-coated shoulders rise from one of their rickety secondhand chairs,  his great leonine face somber and inscrutable. How small his son looked in the seat across from his own, head bowed, shoulders hunched, heavy with some new news from home.

Thomas had died.

That, and only that, was why he had finally come.  There had been angry letters, when their elopement was first realized. Urgent pleas to come home, rages and rants, friends dispatched to reason with him, to show him sense.  But then those, too, had stopped, and they had been left in peace, until this. This trip, this arrival, was Richard Woodhull’s final card, his ace of hearts. His mother, Richard was reporting to his son, was distraught, inconsolable. She’d lost one son, he argued – was it fair to her to deprive her unnecessarily of the other?

Abe went immediately home.

But there could be no return for Anna. A disgraced woman, living in sin in Paris with her lover? Hardly a story one could return to a small, clannish town like Setauket with. She could hardly tell Abe not to go; a person only had one mother.

She could have told him to stay. She had reasons he would have listened to good reasons, strong reasons  – or, well, only one reason, really, one reason that had been making it very hard for her to keep a decent meal down in recent weeks and would, in time, necessitate letting out the waistband on her skirts.

She could have told him, but there hadn’t been time. 

So the night after he left she went downstairs, to Selah’s apartment, and let him undress her and kiss her and think he was consoling her. They were married a few months later, over and around Selah’s objections to outdated bourgeoisie capitalist ideas. It hardly mattered – she lost the baby anyway.

Abe wrote from New York to congratulate them. _So happy for you_ , the letter read. There were other words, too, about the fight for their ideals and the worker’s revolution and all the stuff of bygone meetings in small cafes, but Anna didn’t really see those. All she saw was the bland senselessness of it, the lack of feeling. It wasn’t from the Abe she knew.

He would be married soon too, he reported. Mary Smith  – a friend of his brother’s. They’d been introduced at the funeral, and she’d been such a solace –

What rot. Let him lie to his father, to his new wife, to his friends and his neighbors.  She knew him too well for that. But she said none of this, or any of her other worries to Selah – not as he smiled at the letter and hung the painting in the hotel he’d just inherited from his parents, nor as he met with his friends and continued to speak of the revolution, nor even as his class was called up for conscription and he went into the army, and had returned changed, and then had not returned at all. The silence between them had become quite usual, though his absence did leave a space in her life that even the busiest of hotels could not have filled. Slowly she found Abe creeping back into her life – in the news reports from the Paris Tribune, and the eyes of the Marianne, peering down at her every time she passed it in the hallway. (She couldn’t bear to take it down; Selah had loved it. It was one way to try and keep convincing herself that she hadn’t merely tolerated him.)

And then Major Hewlett had come. He was not a man prone to great speeches and grand ideas, like Selah and Abe had been  – or perhaps he was, among his own people. He seemed the type who might. But here in Paris he was quiet, respectful - reverent, even. Not like the others, who came for the Paris of pink champagne and rosebuds and the bright lights of the Moulin Rouge and the tinted cheeks of the dancers and the mad, gay whirl of life, life, life. He came in search of the scholar’s Paris, the aged back-alleys with dingy windows and booksellers and little old couples on park benches, holding hands.

Which was, of course, why it was perfectly logical that she should run into him - literally, in fact, she nearly knocked him over - at the secondhand bookseller’s on the Rue Lapin.

“Madame LeFort!”

“Major!” She let him help her pack the books back into the basket she’d carried them in, nervously drawing her hand back when their hands found the same book.

“Are you…selling these?” He asked politely, examining some of the titles. Politics, government, mostly smaller presses with a socialist slant. Not the sort of books, she thought, he would have picked up himself. (She wouldn’t have picked them up on her own, either.)

“My late husband’s,” she explained. He nodded politely. “Are you on leave?” she asked. “I hadn’t…seen you for a while.”

“Ah, yes.” He looked embarrassed, and rose unsteadily from the floor, bracing himself against the nearest shelf. She took note of the cane, the pain in his face as he stood up, and suddenly felt very silly indeed. “I’ve been in hospital  – silly, actually – a wound in my…in my foot.” He didn’t want to meet her eye, painfully aware, no doubt, of how the story sounded, as it had sounded when he had told it a dozen times before. _A foot wound, really, how painful. It’ll invalid you out, surely, send you home. Gun discharged on you, did it? How …inconvenient_. “Getting much better now, with the cane. I’ve a few days before I go back. No sense babying it more.”

“Have you found a room, yet?” She couldn’t help but ask. “We have…some free.”

His smile made the boldness worth it. “I shall have my bag sent from the station.”

She knew he had a family, back in England, a father whose dreams were too big for his son’s shoulders and a mother who wrote constantly demanding news. (She had seen the letters on his desk, the orderly replies he drafted in return. They were guarded, veiled, the language in them chosen precisely for its audience, hardly the free and open letters a son should write his mother.) And she knew, too, how much he did not wish to return home to them. She could guess, too, that that had not changed, especially now that there was this consideration of his wound, and that Christmas was nearly upon them.  Better, surely, to stay far away from that, from the prying remarks and the side-long glances and the subtle but not really subtle at all insinuations that he would forever be in the wrong…

She could sympathize. She knew a little bit about families like that.

She went home and aired out his usual room, his bags arriving in good order with their owner shortly behind them. He unpacked and came downstairs, his arrival heralded by the soft thump of his cane and the faint smell of cologne, freshly applied. The knot on his tie was unusually crisp. “Madame LeFort, I was…was wondering if you might permit me to take you to dinner.” He swallowed nervously, straightened up, looked her square in the eye and awaited judgement.

Of course she couldn’t say no.

It was snowing when they stepped out, locking the door behind them and changing the sign to read _Ferme_. The snow created soft halos around the street lights as it fell, silently clumping in the colder corners of the street and leaving the pavements glistening under the street lamps. Inside the restaurant it was warm and full of people, and they basked for two hours in the comfort of a hot meal and several glasses of more than moderately good wine.

When they arrived home, she fumbled at the door for her keys, aware that he was standing close, the chill of the evening driving them into closer quarters than might have been strictly appropriate.

And when she turned to apologize he kissed her. An instinctive kiss, the kind one gives without thinking to people who matter a great deal to you, a sister, a very old friend. Yet there was desperation in it, recklessness, even, his own quiet kind of nerve. His lips and cheeks were cold, and there were spots of snow in his eyelashes, melting rapidly and leaving spangles of water in their wake.

She stopped hunting for her key and, instead of letting him apologize (as he seemed intent on doing) leaned in and made him kiss her again.


	8. The Rose of No-Man's Land, Part 2 (Anna/Hewlett)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> What came after the kiss.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> From an Anonymous prompt on tumblr - "Annlett? WWI AU? They WERE last seen smooching in the snowy streets of Paris after all..."

The street was cold, but all Anna thought of now was fire. She had been so cold, for so long - not because it was winter, but because she did not trust herself to be warm. She trusted now. She wanted heat.

They were not hasty people, but there was haste in what they did - stumbling through the front door and the back passage, anxiously bolting the door to her bedroom behind them. The room was dark, and unfamiliar to Edmund, and they careened into her furniture before she broke away, finding it easier to undress herself then try to riddle out the complexities of his crossbelt and tunic, the separation of their bodies a heady aphrodisiac as the only sounds around them were cloth and breath.

There was a clatter, a stunned, disappointed groan - Anna turned, still in her chemisette and drawers, hair half-unwound, and saw him in the light from the window, jacket gone, braces loose from his shoulders and shirt half-untucked - and his cane lying on the floor beside him where it had fallen.

Oh god, his foot.

There were men loosing arms, legs, faces in this war, the carnage of battle easily seen on any street corner, but in all their haste they’d both forgotten that Edmund, too, was wounded, in a place no one could see, and now he was remembering that to be a gentleman about the thing he’d have to remove his boots – and the truth would out.

His back was hunched, one leg bent so as not to take his weight, an entire posture of agony. She moved to him, tentatively touching his shoulder, steering him towards the side of the bed so he might sit down and give his good leg a rest. Then, without thinking, she knelt and gently began unbuckling and unlacing so she might remove his boots. And he sat by, and let her, defeated.

They would not have let him leave the hospital while such a wound was still healing, and there were no bandages underneath his socks. She peeled those back, too, steeling herself for what she would find.

One foot unharmed, and the other - unmatched. An awkward pink twist of flesh and scars where a toe should have been. From somewhere above her head was another wimper, though she had touched nothing, caused no pain.  _And for this you think I will stop wanting you,_  she thought silently.  _What is all of this but flesh?_

She took his foot in her hands and merely held it for a moment before she stroked his skin, the finely jointed prominences of his ankle, drawing herself closer so that she might kiss his knees, his breath rattling with intensified desire.  _There’s no shame in it, this wound of yours,_  she tried to say with every kiss,  _no shame at all. You are whole in every way that matters to me._

What she gave now Abe had demanded and Selah had never asked for - but Edmund would be gifted it, this reminder of his wholeness, as she made him stand again, pulled down his breeches until they pooled around his ankles and drew aside his drawers.When he urged her face away from him and bid her look up, his face was changed, his agony transmuted into the flame. His eyes met hers and were full of stars, and his hands pulled her towards him and her pillows, her sheets.


End file.
